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“To Make a Show of Concealing”: the Revision of Satire in Earle Birney's

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“To Make a Show of Concealing”: the Revision of Satire in Earle Birney's “To Make a Show of Concealing”: The Revision of Satire in Earle Birney’s “Bushed” Duncan McFarlane long with “David” and “The Damnation of Vancouver,” “Bushed” stands at the head of Earle Birney’s body of poetic work: in popular fame and literary craft, earnestly revered A“with a rather schoolboyish veneration” (Purdy 75) by critics and poets alike. The poem also marks a turning point in Birney’s career. It came just after the completion of his first novel, Turvey, appearing in the col- lection Trial of a City and Other Verse (1952), of which Northrop Frye says “that for virtuosity of language there has never been anything like it in Canadian poetry” (Bush 16), and in which A.J.M. Smith observes “a distinct advance on the simple and unified narrative ‘David’” (12). Yet to look solely at the finished poem is, in this case, to understand a fraction of its total significance. In the process of drafting and revis- ing “Bushed,” Birney transformed the poem from forthright satire into something else entirely. From its first draft — which has never before been analyzed — to its final version, “Bushed” moves between the two extremes that Frye nominates as central themes in Canadian poetry, “one a primarily comic theme of satire and exuberance, the other a pri- marily tragic theme of loneliness and terror” (Bush 168). The published “Bushed” has more in common with Macbeth than with MacFlecknoe, or with satire at all. The revisionary energies at work in Birney’s creative process are driven by an aesthetic bias expressed most clearly in his criticism on Chaucer, through which he expounds a remarkable and condemnatory view of satire as the adolescence of irony. Less than two years after Turvey was published,1 Earle Birney began work on “Bushed,” a poem with which he struggled. Birney has earned a reputation as “a frequent reviser” of his own work (Stouck 108) who made revision not merely a step in the process of composition but “fol- lowed a lifelong practice of revising” his poems (MacDonald 120). Nor did publication render the final word: more than ninety per cent of 186 Scl/Élc the poems in his Selected Poems were revised in one way or another from their prior published versions (Woodcock, “Turning” 166; Carruth 62-63). The problematic development of “Bushed” in particular has been discussed briefly by two prior critics: Richard Robillard, in his companion volume for McClelland and Stewart’s New Canadian Library in 1971 (42-45), and Laurence Steven, in his short article for Canadian Poetry in 1981 (1-2). Robillard is concerned with Birney’s poetic career in general, and argues that the revisions made to “Bushed” mirror a larger movement away from the satiric and satirical (among other things). Steven agrees with this analysis, but takes it further: “While what Robillard says is true on the general level, he fails to take into account the fact that a very similar movement [away from satire] takes place in Birney’s creative process itself” (2). This is an insight of enormous importance in studying Birney: that the pattern of his fin- ished work reflects, on a larger scale, the nature of his creative process, which consists in a maturation away from the satiric. However, the sole source on which both critics base their studies is Birney’s own account of his revisions to “Bushed” in The Creative Writer, which first aired on CBC Radio in 1965 and was subsequently published under that title as a series of essays in 1966. Birney’s anno- tated typescript drafts of “Bushed” were made publicly available that very year,2 when he transferred his papers from the University of British Columbia Library to the Rare Books Room (now the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library) at the University of Toronto to coincide with his writer-in-residence appointment; this collection was accessioned the same year by the reference librarians in Toronto (Barr 43-44).3 Although the Finding Aid for the Birney Collection gives a first accession of 1976 (1), Barr’s 1987 Guide makes it clear that this was in fact the third acces- sion since 1966 (44). While both Robillard’s and Steven’s studies pre- date the comprehensive Finding Aid in 1983 (Shoesmith), both scholars could have made use of Birney’s drafts of “Bushed” but neglected them entirely. It must be admitted that neither Steven nor Robillard discuss the drafting of “Bushed” in great detail. Steven’s article concentrates largely on two other poems, “Transcontinental” and “Man Is A Snow,” using Birney’s descriptions of revising “Bushed” by way of introduc- tion. Robillard, who would have had less ready access to these archival materials in 1971, had, unfortunately, both more occasion and greater cause to do so, with a mandate from McClelland and Stewart (who Earle Birney 187 also published Trial of a City) to discuss Birney’s work at large, and the time and space to consider Birney’s papers in his survey. In neither case was this most important resource consulted, or even acknowledged; both prior studies of the revisions to “Bushed” rely exclusively on The Creative Writer. Apart from the insurmountable problems inherent in taking a poet’s account of his own work at face value, Birney’s published account of his first draft of “Bushed” — “So I began the poem” — is limited to a recollection of the first two lines that does not in fact agree with the first draft in his manuscripts (Creative 29; cf. Draft 1).4 Birney claims to have written “Shouting unspectacled out of the steam,” but the second line of the first draft manuscript originally read something else, most of which Birney deleted using multiple passes of x’s and z’s to almost com- pletely obscure the underlying characters.5 Just the first three words of this original second line survive intact; Birney added a line of type just above the deleted segment, so that the line reads, “You ask me, peering unspectacled out of the steam” (Draft 1). The poet later crossed out the first four of those words with pen and replaced them with “shouting,” at which point the line reads as it finally does in The Creative Writer. Birney also states that he “soon scrapped that” draft (Creative 29), yet the archived first draft is in fact longer than the finished poem and heavily revised. He goes on to quote from a “second attempt” at the poem involving a dialogue in “three voices” (“Creative”; cf. Creative 29-30), which does not appear in the Thomas Fisher collection of his papers. The first three drafts in the collection are numbered sequentially in pen by Birney; the draft labeled “2” is titled “The light” and begins, “When the lightning struck the rainbow of his life,” with no dialogue whatever (Draft 2). This phantom dialogue draft is doubly mysterious because the eight drafts on file are one less than the “nine drafts” Birney claims to have written (Creative 31). Although the original cataloguers of the Earle Birney Collection have since retired from the Thomas Fisher Rare Books Library, the current librarians affirm that it is “extremely impossible that they or anyone since has lost pages or miscegenated [sic] the manuscripts” (Reid; Shoesmith). The reasons for this inconsistency between Birney’s account and his own manuscripts may never be known, but the fact of it should not be overlooked. The author is equally unreliable (factually speak- ing) on other aspects of the draft manuscripts: he claims to have taken 188 Scl/Élc five weeks and seven drafts to identify “Old Sam” and his cabin as the objects of the poem (Creative 30), yet the second draft in the archives, and every one after it, have the same unnamed “he” standing in for “Old Sam” as the final version, and the same figurations of the moun- tain peak as an arrowhead aimed at the man’s heart, and the barring of the cabin door. Birney’s account of the poem’s composition, while certainly useful for supplementary illustration of his own thoughts and feelings toward his work, cannot be relied upon for direct evidence in a serious critical study, and could be seen as effectively prejudicial to any understanding of Birney’s creative process. Moreover, neither Robillard nor Steven appears to have listened to the archival recordings of the ori- ginal CBC broadcasts, removing a further source of aesthetic informa- tion — the author’s illustrative use of voice — which is not necessarily prejudicial, but is actually complementary to the drafts, and which, as I will show, is important to a complete understanding of Birney’s creative process in revising “Bushed.” There is a great deal of open critical ground here, unbroken and unsurveyed. Yet satire is always uncertain territory for criticism. There is little consensus on any aspect of satire: whether it constitutes a genre, form, or mode; whether it is a political, sociological, psychological, or even (some few suggest) a literary phenomenon; whether it is defin- able at all or entirely protean. Birney may have declared his first draft unequivocally “a satire” (Creative 29-33), he may in fact have considered himself a satirist,6 and he may well have been described as one by critics from Malcolm Lowry to A.J.M. Smith to D.J. Dooley, in relation to both his poetry and his prose fiction, but that is still not enough to pro- ceed definitively. What is needed here and now is a relevant provisional definition to get the operation under way; thankfully, we are supplied with two — both Canadian.
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